


037

by muined



Category: Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Plot With Porn, Post-Canon, flagrant Danby abuse, le peril vert, liberties taken with the WWII-era military justice system
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 18:50:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17229311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muined/pseuds/muined
Summary: Happy birthday, Chuck.





	037

**Author's Note:**

> Exists in the same vaguely canon-compliant (i.e., it is assumed that Cathcart and Korn are in a relationship by the end of the novel) timeline as “Fall Guy.” So, technically a sequel? But this one’s a little more of an earnest go at simply expanding on the novel’s canon, without bringing in any backstory headcanon. There’s another post-canon fic on AO3, “Sweden” by @owlinaminor, that I read right after finishing _Catch-22_ for the first time. It’s very dear to me, and has shaped my ideas about the fates of various characters greatly. This fic is sort of an attempt to explain what happened to the characters left unaccounted for, in fanwork and in Heller’s “sequel,” _Closing Time_ , in which Cathcart and Korn are addressed not at all.
> 
> Warning for fat middle-aged man sex? That is what you’re here for, right?

**December 27th, 1944**

Korn had picked up recently on the fact that Cathcart ate, when alone with Korn, in the same way he ate when he assumed no one at all was watching. What this said about their relationship Korn didn't bother attempting to divine; the crucial thing was that it was so patently unsexy that it looped back around to extremely so. Korn watches Cathcart skim buttercream from his plate onto a forkful of nearly black cake with a pinkie, hunched over his desk, holding the china close to his face.

"What?" Cathcart asks.

"Nothing."

Cathcart frowns at him, distrustful, as he dispatches a strawberry, leaving its calyx intact between his thumb and forefinger. “Are you trying to poison me?”

“Chuck! You wound me. I wouldn’t dare, not on your birthday.”

Cathcart, opposite Korn at the prow of the desk, winces. Already ill-at-ease over having spent another year on the earth without having made general, Cathcart had of late experienced hardship previously unknown to him: an anonymous informant (under the name Irvington Washing; as to his true identity, Korn had his suspicions) had given away their game. Twenty-Seventh Air Force Headquarters had caught wind of their nearly year-long lapse in requisitioning replacement crews, and an investigation had been opened. Thin and clear-eyed new C.I.D. men had swamped the base, and were collecting testimony from officers and enlisted men alike. Cathcart's authority as Group Commander had been suspended the day before; the group deferred for the time being to his second-in-command, but even Korn had been banned from volunteering the group for new missions, for the duration of the investigation.

And so Korn had taken it upon himself to ease Cathcart’s suffering with a two-man birthday soiree, three nights before the new year and two after Christmas. Christmas is Cathcart’s favorite holiday; Korn had assumed otherwise upon learning that Cathcart had been born two days after the Lord. Logically he would be at least a little resentful, having been upstaged so spectacularly. “Tough act to follow, I’d think,” Korn had quipped, and Cathcart had swatted him. Korn would admit that this hadn’t been his best material. It is night, and raining; not since Bologna had it rained this hard for this long. Lightning is visible through the pane of the tall window behind Cathcart; without delay, thunder rolls. The air within the drafty Group Headquarters building, draftier since Milo’s raid in July, is wet and pendulous. The same could be said for the cake; Korn notes that Cathcart has nearly finished his first slice.

Korn, with interest: “How is it, Colonel?”

Cathcart, stubbornly: “You’re eating it yourself, Blackie, why don’t you tell me?”

“It’s good.”

“Isn’t it? What’s in it?”

Korn smiles placidly. “Tomatoes,” he tells Cathcart, and continues to smile placidly as Cathcart allows his mouth to fall open and the soggy cake to fall back out onto his plate.

“Whah?”

“Canned plum tomato puree, Chuck, from our farm. Well, theoretically from our farm.”

“But why is it in my birthday cake?” Cathcart pauses to scrape more cake from his tongue with his front teeth. “Can you poison someone with tomato?”

Korn hasn’t in the past bothered educating Cathcart on the properties of tomatoes, and doesn’t see why he should explain now what they are and are not capable of. “Milo’s liquidating his supply.”

“Oh. Don’t remind me.”

The cake itself was a consolation gift from Milo, who had, the day before, sat Cathcart down and had a frank talk with him about his future with M&M Enterprises: namely, that there wasn't to be one if he was to be court-martialed. Cathcart took Milo’s recent campaign to insert plum tomatoes into every dish that would bear them as an ill omen of his impending dismissal from his post as company vice president. Milo had no faith in Cathcart’s innocence of the crimes with which he had not yet been charged, and was thus divorcing himself from their tomato racket. Korn’s position with the company, however, was apparently secure, as he had not been issued such an ultimatum; he had refrained from informing Cathcart of this.

Korn remembers something else he had acquired from Milo’s wing of the black market and had been saving for this occasion. He excuses himself to fetch drinks from his office and returns to find Cathcart smoking a cigarette. He had abandoned the long gaudy cigarette holder he used to favor after their deal with Yossarian soured; it was the last in a series of blows to Cathcart’s delicate ego which taken together had left him in a diminished, downtrodden state.

Korn sits, and transfers from a tray on his lap to Cathcart’s yellow oak desk two frosted, faceted reservoir glasses, a carafe of cold water, a freestanding three-legged grille, a jar of sugar cubes to be drained through it, and finally a long-necked sea-green bottle of hornworm-green liquid. “This isn't bourbon,” Cathcart observes, Colonel Obvious, and looks up at Korn, wholesome American brow furrowed.

Korn half-fills one of the glasses, and begins, in measured cloudy increments, to add water. “It’s absinthe.”

“Now this really does look like poison,” Cathcart says of it, his mental image of poisons based entirely on cartoons. “What’s it made of, anyway?”

Wormwood, anise, Korn thinks. Sweet fennel. “Little boys like you.”

“Oh, shut up.” Cathcart groans, put-upon. He takes the reservoir glass, cupping its stem with both hands as if it is hot chocolate, and laps at it tentatively. “I don’t know why I keep you around." Korn can think of a few reasons.

Cathcart makes a face; “You’ll like it better with more sugar,” Korn tells him, and finishes diluting his own glass, demonstrating the use of the grille. “Be patient.”

Cathcart's manner in the past week had been that of a Romanov imprisoned in a gloomy gothic castle and awaiting execution. Christmas day had passed without fanfare. They hadn't yet discussed the near future, the fact that despite their best efforts Cathcart was unlikely now ever to become a general, nor even to remain a colonel for much longer. All the feathers in Cathcart's cap had calcified into embittered stalactites, and everything seemed to be crashing down around him, all Korn’s best-laid plans, just as Cathcart's ferry-plane over the sea from Rome two weeks prior had dropped abruptly, falling two hundred feet through the salt air before Milo had wrested the controls away from the self-immolative pilot. Inspired by the departed Yossarian (who to the men left behind had become a saint of sorts; they haven’t talked about Yossarian either) he had sought to destroy himself along with Cathcart for the good of the base. Since, Cathcart had developed acute fears of water, of flying, and of the airmen of Pianosa, all arguably warranted. Persecuted, he hadn’t left his office and adjoining bedroom in three days. Cathcart hated even to be reminded of the sea’s existence, at dinner earlier had picked dejectedly at his wrasse in tomato reduction. He had too, appropriately, sustained a literal, physical black eye in the near-crash—healed, but there remained a waning crescent of abalone on his left cheekbone.

Cathcart was puffing on his cigarette and brooding, now. Korn took him in. The colonel had outgrown—his word—his current uniforms but refused to send away for new ones because he didn't want Wintergreen in the mail room, and by extension the whole Twenty-seventh Air Force, to know that there was more of him than there had used to be. This was despite Korn’s assurance that if he continued to ignore the issue the reality of the situation would be apparent to anyone with eyes. Tonight, as per this predicament, Cathcart wears with his trousers only a white regulation tee shirt, still undersized: there wasn’t a great deal of mystery to Cathcart's anatomy, generally, but even so Korn appreciated how little his choice of attire this evening left to the imagination. Cathcart puts out his cigarette butt in an ashtray already populated with them. Sheets of rain lash against the window; periodic deluges like this prevent their ever forgetting that Pianosa is an island, a tiny island threatened constantly with subsumption back into the black ocean.

Born immediately before the present century began revolving, Korn remembers the anti-absinthe crusade of the nineteen-teens, his teens. There had been a Frenchman or Switzer who had a taken in a modicum of absinthe, slaughtered his family, and been dubbed absinthe-mad; the coiners of the phrase paid no mind to the pints of other liquors he had consumed between the absinthe and the family-slaughtering (the dose, the poison, etc.). Regardless of the term’s diagnostic accuracy—minimal—it is what comes to mind when Cathcart takes his empty cake plate in one hand and chucks it to the far wall, where it shatters. Korn finds Cathcart’s reservoir glass still nearly full, short only that reticent initial sip. Cathcart cannot be drunk.

Korn silently invites an explanation, eyebrows raised. Cathcart sweeps another armful of ephemera from the desk, glowering at him. Korn stoops to pick something up, but Cathcart brings a fist down hard on his buzzer, holds it there as Korn straightens, and then as Korn begins to inquire as to what’s gotten into him pounds on it twice more in succession, maintaining eye contact. Holds it down again.

“Help me, Korn, for God’s sake,” Cathcart demands, through clenched teeth, backlit by lightning. “Do something. I can’t take any more of this.” There was something about Cathcart when he got like this, now and back in November when he had been informed of the magnitude of their losses over La Spezia, when he had counted on his fingers as he received a squadron commander’s report by telephone, elated by the number of form letters he could now send stateside, each of them in his estimation increasing the chances of his own immortality in the pages of the _Saturday Evening Post_. Korn had no use for morals, of course, but there was something about Cathcart at his most Molochian that gave him pause; maybe it was the hand Korn knew he had had in creating Cathcart. His monster. Here was another thing that looped around; Korn’s baggy trousers feel less than.

“Well, Colonel, what do you want me to—” Korn’s question is truncated as Cathcart slams the buzzer again.

“Oh, I don’t know what I want, Korn.” Cathcart puts a knee up on the desk, crawls cumbrously up and over it, slings a thigh and calf over the opposite side into Korn’s lap. What he wants: to be a general, they’d both always assumed. In the past, at least, they had operated jointly under an understanding that their shared goal was advancement. Both aspiring. With the lightning, Cathcart casts a long shadow over him: “Exercise your best judgment.”

Korn, holding Cathcart’s heel in one palm, draws up the wool curtain of the colonel’s pant leg to expose one of his sock garters, with a detached, clinical manner, as if only to ascertain that it remained where he’d last seen it.

“Dirty,” Cathcart huffs raggedly, his other knee drawn to his chest. “Dirty old man.” Korn snaps the elastic band of the garter against his shin in retribution. “Korn,” Cathcart whines.

“Sir.” Korn draws his chair back, letting Cathcart’s foot fall and dangle off the desk. He feigns exhaustion, yawns. “You know, Colonel, I think I’ll turn in for the night. I don’t believe I’m in the mood.” He crosses his legs coyly to disguise the fact that he is in fact very much in the mood.

Cathcart smiles, turbid pale eyes unblinking, and smashes Korn’s reservoir glass. To what degree Korn has yet to determine, but the colonel has become aware of his sway over his aide. “Well, let me see if I can’t put you there.”

Cathcart drops to the floor and swings his hips, absurdly, as if they are Saran-wrapped in a sequined leotard and there is a spray of ostrich plumes fanning out behind him, as if this is the officer's club and he is the night's entertainment. Korn supposes that last clause is accurate. He puts his tongue in his cheek, considering the problem of physics posed by the possibility of Cathcart going ahead and doing what he looks for all the world to be preparing for. He’s learned this from watching U.S.O. shows, Korn supposes, again—the colonel has apparently taken in more of these than Korn had given him credit for, considering he has been Korn's private entertainment in unlit corners of the club for the majority of them. The problem of physics, anyway, had to do with masses, and a word that would complete a limerick couplet whose first line ended with “mass,” and the fortitude of Cathcart's spare office chair. Korn steels himself for the practical application of the theoretical.

Cathcart, still affecting sequins and feathers, hums something, some radio jingle or a popular song, but trails off as he becomes absorbed in the business of shimmying, off-time, as he draws closer to Korn. Korn, with the tips of his thumbs and index fingers, guides Cathcart's waist, turning him around with the goal of leading him away from his seat (which seems to have grown fragiler below him as Cathcart has advanced), but gingerly, so as to allow Cathcart to assume it was his own idea to double back—this is the way it always has been, is and must be with them.

Reluctantly, because although this hasn’t been particularly titillating he is now in a very favorable position (eye-level with Cathcart's rear), and gently, Korn begins to protest: "Chuck, I really don't think you should—”

There is a knock at the door. From without, Major Danby’s voice: “Colonel Cathcart, sir?”

Cathcart groans, sags. Without ceremony he takes a seat in Korn’s lap; miraculously, the chair remains intact. Korn releases his held breath.

“There is—I would very much appreciate it if you could come down to the lobby to take a look at something,” says Danby; Korn tries to focus on the fact that out in the open-air corridor that leads to the colonel’s office Danby is certainly being rained upon.

Korn detests Danby. Korn is forbearing, typically, and endlessly indulgent with Cathcart, but Danby’s brand of hand-wringing, servile decency drives him up the wall. He has in the past suspected—untowardly, perhaps—suspected Danby of harboring (well-hidden) designs on Cathcart, and at one point cornered him in the hall and threatened him with Dunbar’s fate: the wrong end of a funny-smelling rag. Danby had denied all charges levelled against him and Korn had released his hold of Danby’s tie, reluctantly, after reiterating the threat in the case that Danby told anyone of this; there lingered, since this confrontation, an awkwardness between the two of them, and, almost entirely foreign to Korn, a vague sense of embarrassment. Moreover, since the advent of the investigation, since Cathcart’s pre-emptive dismissal from the expanded M&M Enterprises, Korn has detected from Danby a feeble, infuriating breed of pity. The majority of Korn’s most recent conversations with Danby have been mediated by a locked office door.

“Sir?”

Cathcart, still in Korn’s lap, stretches out toward the desk. Roots around with one fist in the Mason jar for a handful of sugar cubes for the grille and tops off his glass with a splash of water, clumsily. With his letter opener, he reaches to slice himself another piece of chocolate cake, its secret ingredient forgotten—with his left hand, and the distance, he slips and comes away with only a sliver, at which point he drains the glass. “Make him go away, Korn.”

Who is he to deny Cathcart this request—to deny him anything? “Danby,” Korn coughs, deciding not to bother with any real pretense. “The colonel and I are busy. Get back to us.”

Nothing from Danby for a few seconds, and then: “Twenty minutes, sir.”

“Very good, Danby.” Korn hears Danby plod wetly back from whence he came. The matter at hand; Cathcart shifts in Korn’s lap, leaning back into him insistently, legs splayed and feet braced against the desk drawer before them. After savoring this geometrical arrangement for a few seconds, he jostles his knee and pats Cathcart’s thigh. “Up, Colonel. We’d best get busy; I agreed to twenty minutes, and I wouldn’t want to break my sacred word.” Cathcart acquiesces, after doing away with the last of his cake.

Cathcart on his feet. Korn had observed Dreedle's nurse, when the general visited, and had decided he'd like to see Cathcart in a custom uniform like hers, a tight tieless button-down and pleated green slacks that would ride up on the colonel's big pale thighs and cleave his asscheeks in two like halves of an overripe tomato when he stood at attention. Korn knew that Cathcart wouldn't readily adopt a uniform like Dreedle's nurse's, but took comfort in the fact that the union of Cathcart and his existing pairs of pants was fast approaching this Platonic ideal.

Oh, it was difficult to resist temptation when it came to Cathcart; even back when they’d known one another only in the non-scriptural definition of the word, Korn had longed to fondle Cathcart every time he found him seated at a high barstool in the Officer's Club. How things had changed since—and how much more they were liable to in the near future! Korn indulges in an old fantasy, imagining a future, following Cathcart’s trial, in which he, Korn, is a full colonel, a general even, and Cathcart his virtual catamite, concubine, a buck private or a civilian he keeps around his quarters. "Say, who is that big dark-haired gentleman caller of yours, General Korn? I seem to remember him from somewhere." "Oh, no-one of import." But it was only a fantasy, and somehow deficient, dissatisfying. Korn couldn't picture Cathcart absent his entitlement, deprived of his unearned station—it was no fun. Keeping Cathcart's mercurial self-worth airworthy was Korn's hobby.

Korn reaches around Cathcart and runs his thumb down over his gut and to his belt buckle. "May I?" Cathcart nods vigorously, so Korn undoes the belt and shimmies off Cathcart's trousers, services the colonel a little through his briefs (damp already) while discarding his own pants. Cathcart hands Korn a tin of petroleum jelly from the drawer, fumbling with it in his eagerness, and Korn coaxes Cathcart forward, wedges him against the desk such that his tented nethers are flush with the underhanging sliding drawer. Cathcart hisses. Korn ignores him while busying himself with the application of the jelly. He then kneads Cathcart’s shank, roughly, from his inner thighs upward, thinking fondly of the trails of pearlescent bruises he’ll leave, before hiking the crotch of Cathcart’s briefs up and to the right.

Cathcart's desk has figured in small or large part into many of their more intimate initiatives. Korn has considered the possibilities of his hiding Cathcart under said desk while calmly taking down an appointment from Danby, or—for Korn believes in doing unto others—of hiding there himself and taking Cathcart’s mind off of bomb patterns while the colonel accepts a call from Twenty-seventh Headquarters. Both possibilities, however, are precluded by the fact that neither of them can fit comfortably in the legspace between the desk’s two cabinet-columns.

“Come on, Korn, put some hustle into it.”

So ordered, Korn buries himself in his commanding officer's ass. “Hustle,” he recalls, was a word Cathcart had borrowed from Dreedle—it remained in Cathcart’s vocabulary, vestigial, from the era in which he had conscientiously emulated the general. The Age of Dreedle: halcyon days, they seemed now, during which he and Cathcart had first met and first fucked.

Now Scheisskopf was in—no matter. Inconsequential, as in this moment Korn is in—and now out. In again. Cathcart is from the waist up prostrate on the desk’s surface, on his elbows and scrabbling for purchase and then gripping the far edge, his back now concave, now convex in pursuit of a more opportune angle. Korn leans forward and finds it for him, then rewards himself by slipping a hand up under Cathcart’s shirt.

“Jesus Christ, you’re cold, Blackie,” Cathcart yelp-laughs.

Korn snorts. “I’ll cop to cold-blooded. And, Chuck, you do know what they say about the Lord’s name.” He finds Cathcart’s right tit—tetin de satin blanc tout neuf—and celebrates this discovery with a zeal that is not likely endorsed by scripture, nor governed by decretal.

“What do they say?” A rhythm established, now. Cathcart has one forearm overhanging the desk and the other arched immediately behind his shoulder, his elbow red, raw. Korn puts his left hand over Cathcart’s, runs his thumb over the colonel’s knuckles. Lightning outside, followed by thunder. Cathcart’s veins blue under his milk-white skin.

“I don’t know—shouldn’t there be an ‘H’ in there somewhere?” Korn stoops again to kiss the nape of Cathcart’s neck, now goosepimpled, and then finishes. Prepares to pull out, but Cathcart stops him:

“Stay.” Cathcart winded, vulnerable. “Please.”

Korn stays. Remembers the title of a movie musical from a decade prior: _Love Me Forever_. Cathcart is bad with endings. Cathcart never finishes the _Saturday Evening Post_ stories, fiction and nonfiction, that he begins—doesn’t bother reading beyond the illustrated pages, never follows narratives to their conclusions back into the narrow columns of the ad-dense latter half of each issue. Something comes together for Korn, thinking of the _Post_ and of La Spezia: Cathcart doesn’t understand death. That was his secret. Korn holds him, dutifully, ridiculous, completely ridiculous, bare-assed under his shirttails. As he reaches down into Cathcart’s briefs, he picks up the refrain that Cathcart had hummed earlier, and finds as he hums it himself that the song is, improbably, “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer.” Korn puts slack into Cathcart’s previously taut waistband, freeing him and provoking a sharp exhalation. His cheek to Cathcart’s shoulder blade; Cathcart, with his assistance, getting off, quiet but for his heavy breathing.

“Yeah. Okay. Okay, Korn.”

Korn take his leave of Cathcart and pulls his trousers back on, pausing to admire the dorsal view of Cathcart pushing himself up from the desk, laboriously, pants around his ankles, his shirt having ridden up almost to his nipples. Cathcart wipes his face with the heel of his hand and tugs his bunched underwear back into place. Callipygian, with all his weight on one leg, his inordinately long thighs together and painted blue-white by the unwholesome light of the storm outside, he looks almost like one of Milo’s statues, the plaster reproductions of marble deities that Milo sells in bulk. Almost. Hairier, Korn would grant.

“Another drink, Colonel?”

“You’re trying to get me drunk,” Cathcart (nose red, ears red, cheeks damp: distinctly neo-Classical, after all) accuses, but only half-heartedly, and readily accepts the glass Korn nudges him with as he circles to the far side of the desk to take a seat in Cathcart’s own sturdier, more comfortable swivel chair.

“Oh, so I’ve given up on trying to poison you, then? Your outlook seems to be improving.”

As Cathcart downs it (greedily; “Growing on you?” “Shut up; thirsty, is all”), Korn reclines, basks. All right with the world. When he next opens his eyes, Cathcart is doing a sort of nervous absinthe-dance in his favorite corner of the room, his back to Korn.

"Well, do you feel ready for another year, Colonel? Once more around the sun?" Korn swizzles his pointer finger in a neat ellipse.

Cathcart looks superior. "It's the sun that travels ‘round the earth, Blackie."

Korn pauses, black eyebrows rising just over the northernmost borders of his inscrutable glasses. "Oh, yes, you're right. My mistake. Do you know what a portent is, Chuck?"

Cathcart is put on edge by the roundness of the word—his hands shoot reflexively to his hips. "Do I have one?"

Korn laughs aloud, not in the low sardonic manner which is his custom but with pure raucous affection. He has succeeded, apparently, in taking Cathcart’s mind off of his present situation; Korn is pleased to see that the colonel is preoccupied again with more traditional Cathcartly concerns. His old self. "Chuck, a portent is like a harbinger."

"Is that anything like a Clevinger?" Cathcart wonders absently, dwelling again on his reflection in the corner mirror, sucking in his stomach.

"It's an omen, a sign of things to come. I think, Chuck, I really think that things are looking up for the two of us." Korn allows himself to imagine a future for the two of them that had nothing at all to do with making war, and found it hospitable. A plot of vegetables other than tomatoes behind their farmhouse, which had been purchased under a false name and on Uncle Sam's dime, but untraceably, and would foreseeably be theirs even after one or both of them was dishonorably discharged. If Cathcart was broken up over this turn of events, he was, for it, all the more an idiot. Korn said this aloud: "Chuck, you're an idiot."

"What?” He pivots on his heels and wobbles over to the desk. “You can't talk to your superior officer that way."

"You aren't going to be my superior officer for much longer." Korn stands, and cups Cathcart's face in his hands, running his thumbs over the colonel’s cheeks before he releases him, allows him to sit. Opposite him, in the spare chair Korn had occupied earlier. "You are going to be court-martialed, and I'm going either to take your position as group commander, at least for an interim, providing I claim I was only following orders. Or: I am going to cop to your accusation that I assisted you willingly—and you are going to accuse me of this, Chuck, when push comes to shove—and be discharged along with you. Do time, even.” Follow, follow. In Hell and still watering his orchid. “It's my decision, but I'm going to choose you. Can't you see, Chuck? I'm not going to leave you. None of this matters, so long as I continue to help you, and I will. I’ve thrown my lot in with you."

Cathcart is now formally intoxicated, has been wilting into uneasy sleep over his empty plate for the duration of Korn's declaration, but now perks up and appears immensely gratified. "You love me."

In the near-crash, their plane had rolled violently to one side and when Cathcart’s left eye had been introduced to a bulkhead he had bit his lip; blood had spurted weightless through the air and spattered Korn’s glasses. Their being swallowed by the sea, very shortly, had seemed inevitable, but Korn’s first impulse had not been to acknowledge his own impending death. He had found that instead he’d resigned himself, in seconds, to in the near future dragging Cathcart to a life vest or a buoyant piece of debris to cling to, as the two of them were tossed by massive waves and battered with water. He had seen their path to land, a circuitous dashed line as on a map of combat operations, looping back in on itself occasionally, buffeted by subsurface currents, dragged this way and that by undertow. But with a destination.

Korn coughs, affirms this. "I love you."

Cathcart closes his eyes and nods. "Suspected as much." The crucial thing.

“Sirs? I have someone here that I think you really ought to see.” Danby again. The colonels groan in unison; Korn, raising his eyes to the heavens, or the water-stained ceiling, in mock supplication—deliver him from Danby—finds his small pleasure to take this second time in the fact that the major’s bedroom is directly below Cathcart’s in the building, and thus Danby is privy to and likely has been kept awake by their congress.

Thus fortified, Korn stalks across the room and unlocks the door. “Come in, Danby.”

Bandy-legged Danby appears, takes in the half-eaten cake, the exotic green glass bottle, and the shards of china flatware that litter the floor. Wordlessly, he produces from behind him in the doorframe a little girl, not thirteen, her longish dark hair plastered to her face and neck by the rain—which has saturated her dress, which even now is waterlogging their fine rug.

The girl steps forward, uncowed. “My sister sent me,” she says in clear-voiced, articulate Italian. Cathcart, who knows no more Italian than he needs to order at restaurants, looks to Korn, helplessly, for a translation.

Danby intercedes: “Captain Black and I, he’s better with the language, we’ve been listening to her since she arrived, I think,”—he checks his wristwatch—“I think about half an hour ago, and we’ve come to believe that this is the younger sister of the woman who stabbed, who stabbed, er, Yossarian, sirs.” Danby winces as if he expects Cathcart or Korn to hurl something at him, the name of their nemesis thus invoked, but receives no according response from Cathcart; the Colonel is occupied in staring at the wall behind Danby and kneading his jaw, distant. Danby continues, choppily, in starts and stops. “Chaplain Tappman and I caught her, remember, after she, er, after she made herself known to us again, but she—she broke free, and escaped to the mainland. Anyway, this girl.”

The girl swats Danby’s concerned hands from her shoulders and addresses Cathcart. “Sei il colonnello?” Cathcart looks to Korn again, lost. Korn shakes his head, shrugs, for the girl’s benefit. What, him, a colonel?

“Apparently the sister told her to track the two of you down in the event that she didn’t return. She doesn’t seem to have a place to stay; she lived in the brothel with her sister, but it was raided in November. Her parents have, ah, have passed. Or so we gathered.” The girl’s dark eyes flit around the room and alight upon Cathcart’s monogrammed letter-opener, still covered in the cake it had been used to cut, earlier, and teetering on the edge of his desk.

Korn spins a pen in one hand. “Did you happen to gather how she got here, Danby?” he asks, not without venom. “This is an island.”

“Well, she won’t tell us, but we assume she must’ve inherited the same aptitude for stowing away on planes that her sister, uh, exhibited.” Danby’s eyes dart to the girl for a half-second before he adds: “Colonel.”

“Il colonnello!” the girl cries, triumphant, and lunges across the room for the letter opener. Korn reaches it before she does, batting it to the floor with one outstretched wrist, and Cathcart, having risen to his feet unsteadily, intercepts the girl’s attempt at dispatching Korn unarmed. He stumbles backward with the weight of her, holding her tight to his chest as she writhes, kicking. Then he lists again in the opposite direction and comes to rest atop the desk with a dull thud.

“Neglected to tell us she also inherited her sister’s affinity for assassination, Danby?” Korn hisses, seated as he has remained since Danby and the girl entered. Danby doesn’t answer.

Into Cathcart’s big shoulder, the girl, now limp, sobs: “Mia sorella—l’avevano uccisa.” Cathcart, his eyes like saucers, pats her back, rocks on his heels. “Brutos,” she murmurs. “Assassinos.”

“There, there,” Cathcart repeats lamely. “What’s she saying?”

“We didn’t kill your sister,” Korn reassures her, in Italian. She stares at him. “Look, she’s probably alive.”

While still staring intently at Korn, she rips out a handful of Cathcart’s chest hair. “Bugiardo!” Cathcart doesn’t drop her and reacts to her attack only after the fact, his red face quivering before his eyes well with tears: the Pietà of Pianosa. The girl looks almost chagrined.

Korn clears his throat. “Danby. How’d she know to look for a colonel, the group commander?”

Danby, wringing out his hat—the rain has stopped—replies that the sister, the older one, seems to have been on a mission to avenge Nately’s death and at first had blamed Yossarian, hence the stabbing, but that she must have, er, have overheard Danby and the group’s chaplain discussing the circumstances of Nately's death and accordingly had swapped out Yossarian for Cathcart, sending her sister after him too. Somehow the kid sister had managed to reach Group Headquarters first.

"That doesn't make any sense, Danby.” In Italian: “Little one, what's your name?"

The foreign operative is silent.

"It's in your best interest to cooperate with us, cara.”

“Mi chiamo Belinda," she offers belligerently.

“Mi chiamo Charles," Cathcart slurs, bouncing her.

"Belindetta, your sister didn't want you to kill us, did she?"

After a sulky pause in which she rakes her teeth over her lower lip, Belinda shakes her head.

"This was a reconnaissance mission, then?" Korn asks, in so many words. His Italian, laid on a foundation of French, is better than Cathcart's or Danby’s, but soon will reach the extent of its utility. "You were to have come here only to find out who Nately’s—your sister's boy friend’s—commander was, and then you were to report back to her; you got overambitious, is all. Is that right? You decided that if you wanted something done right you ought to do it yourself."

Belinda nods, burying her nose in Cathcart's neck.

The waterworks earlier were real but this is a feint, Korn decides, intended to ward off further inquiry. He is enjoying himself now. "Good girl. Now, one last question, and then you'll have some cake for your trouble. Did you come here alone?"

Belinda's small face surfaces, white where it had before been olive. "No-o—cioè sì, Colonnello, sì! Yes!"

Korn tsks. "You'd make a poor spy, Belinda. Loyal, sure; you'd swallow your cyanide chiclet before giving away your master. But that policy wouldn't get you far in the world. You must learn to think of your own career, mia cara.” The child begins to cry again in earnest; Korn turns back to Danby. "Well?"

"Sir?" The major has retreated into the dark of the open-air hall.

"Well, what do you make of that, Danby?"

Insomuch as his nature allows him, Danby speaks sullenly, his scheme at least half unearthed, the game up: "Her sister is on the island."

"Good, Danby. And who does she mean to kill at this juncture?"

Without inflection: "You or Colonel Cathcart, sir."

"And what are you going to do about that, Danby?"

Approaching catatonic, his face obscured still in shadow: "Spread word around the base about her?"

"Oh, no, Danby, that won't do. You know me better than that; I can't do things the straight-and-narrow way. Since I don't believe our mostriciattola can be relied upon to turn double-agent for us and lead her sister into a trap, I think we'd do best to keep the younger here and help the elder figure out who we are and where to find us, indirectly—announce a parade or a party in the Colonel's honor, or something, where she should be able to hear it—and if that doesn't work we'll let her know that we have her agent here and that we'll dispatch her if she doesn't turn herself in. But before you do anything else send up a herd of MPs. And a flight of sherry. Oh, and send de Cover—on second thought, send Staff Sergeant Whitcomb up to receive the same message. These are critical times, Danby. We just don't know who we can trust."

Danby wavers, a spider divorced from his web. "The girl?"

"The girl what?"

"...the girl, sir."

"We'll keep her. Get out of here, Danby," he spits, and Danby obeys.

After he's gone: "How's that, Chuck: an assassin loose, our Danby mutinous, a new ward. Hasn't it been an eventful birthday?"

Cathcart is drunk still, and still saddled with the kid sister. "Cut her some cake, Korn. You promised."

Korn sighs, fetches the letter opener, does so. "She can walk, Chuck."

"Right." Cathcart deposits her on the floor, where she takes interest in the office accoutrements strewn around the room, begins foraging among them while gnawing on her cake. Cathcart’s white tee is soaked through where he’d held her. Belinda. “You don’t think, Korn?”

“What don’t I think?”

“You don’t think we might be wise to spend a few days up at our house while this blows over?”

It wouldn’t blow over, not any time soon. Their house, he had called it. Korn, tossing a piece of china into the wastebin, is again drawn into the thrall of the vegetable plot. A citrus orchard: lemons for pickling and oranges for marmalade. For bread they’d go down into the village below and buy or barter under one of the identities they’d cultivated for the tomato trade. “Ah, Signor Calvo.” There was that lavender (or was it lilac?) farm to the north of them to which Cathcart was allergic—but they'd take sea holidays in Gallipoli when the lilacs (lavender?) bloomed. Gallipoli, Europe's permissive mores: attractive. He tells Belinda, in Italian, to go behind the teakwood folding screen in Cathcart’s adjoining room and get out of her wet dress. She does so, but not without comment: “Parli come un francese, vecchio.”

"Sono americano,” Korn replies archly. "Mon chou," he adds.

“Sciocco Colonnello!” She pokes her head around the screen and sticks her tongue out.

Cathcart wipes his nose. “‘S’funny, Korn, she calls _you_ ‘Colonel.’ Seems to’ve gotten the wrong idea of who’s in charge around here.” Korn leaves that untouched, allows Cathcart to continue rambling. “What was it you called her earlier? Mostaccioli?” Cathcart doesn’t wait for a reply. He finishes off the bottle, still on the desk, and wanders out of the office and into the bedroom, to the sink and mirror in the corner, and then to find a shirt of his to be used as an oversized nightdress for the girl. “Blackie?" he calls from there, from his dresser, his absinthe-saturated tone a cipher.

"Hmn?"

“What you said earlier—I think I’m ready to stop aspiring."

Korn could kiss him. Would. He turns to the window, and, catching his own reflection, adjusts the yaw of his glasses. Wonders momentarily how long they’d been askew—dismisses the thought. Raining again, the unseen sea roiling. That same tenacious melody: though there’s one motor gone, we can still carry on—

“Colonnello?” Belinda inquires from the threshold, resembling a child sovereign of old in Cathcart’s tentlike pink dress shirt. Something small and dense is concealed in the hand behind her back; there may be some hope for her yet, Korn thinks approvingly.

He ducks. Cathcart’s paperweight flies overhead, missing him by inches.

 

**Epilogue**

Forcibly exiled (as was the Emperor of the French, once, Korn reminded Cathcart—he never finished Napoleon’s story), they were to spend a few days in the house in the hills. After three of those days, Belinda, with whom they hadn’t trusted the men on base, took ill—in seven more, she recovered, and still they had received no word from Pianosa. No C.I.D. men came knocking. Korn had tasked Cathcart with informing a subordinate of their whereabouts, and Cathcart, he learned after some arm-twisting, had chosen Danby as his confidante. Korn could have kicked himself. Danby, in whom Cathcart had always placed an incongruous, naive trust: Danby, they found out later, had had his revenge by telling the C.I.D. investigators that his two superiors had deserted. Warrants were put out for their arrest. But because Danby hadn’t known the location of the farmhouse, they weren’t located.

Another week and Belinda had given up on trying to kill them. Two, and Cathcart, to win a bet, had with that favorite letter opener of his put a notch in the wall above the crown of her head when she stood straight (“See, Blackie? Five feet even”). Three, and Cathcart had resigned himself to doing his own laundry. Four and they had decided on Smith for Belinda, over Radcliffe or Bryn Mawr. In early spring, two sunchairs appeared behind the house, in a patch of black-eyed susans.

**Author's Note:**

> It it isn’t clear: Danby and the Chaplain caught Nately’s whore after she attempted to stab Yossarian as he escaped for Sweden, and explained the truth—essentially, that Nately’s death was Cathcart’s fault, or at least this was how she interpreted it—before releasing her, after they had sworn her against pursuing Yossarian.
> 
> If this isn’t clear, either: Cathcart’s “you love me” revelation was an allusion to a single sentence in Chapter 20: “Nobody loved him.” Spot all the other repurposed quotes from the novel and we’ll be friends forever.
> 
> Finally: do you want to live it up Cathcart-style on your birthday or for another special occasion—an upcoming career change, perhaps? Well, look no further. Here’s a recipe for the chocolate cake described in this fic, which I, um, baked myself, as research. Don’t worry, you can’t actually taste the tomatoes in it at all; Cathcart was just being, er, himself. Serves one group commander, one group executive officer, and one small interloper.
> 
>   1. First, cream the wet ingredients together, one at a time: 
>     1. 2 sticks softened butter (or butter substitute of your choice)
>     2. 1.75 cup sugar
>     3. 1 teaspoon vanilla
>     4. 3 eggs, separated (blend yolks in first, then beat whites by mixer or by hand until stiff and fold in following the addition of the tomatoes)
>     5. 1 cup cold water
>     6. 0.33 cup pureed tomatoes or tomato paste (make sure this includes no salt or other seasonings; M&M-brand canned tomatoes come plain)
>   2. Next, sift the dry ingredients together: 
>     1. 2.5 cups cake flour
>     2. 0.5 cup dry cocoa
>     3. 1.5 teaspoon baking soda
>     4. 1 teaspoon salt
>   3. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet; an electric mixer helps.
>   4. Bake in two greased and floured round 8.5’’ pans at 350°F for 35-40 minutes. Remove, let cool, then stack one atop the other, on a desk if possible.
>   5. Frost with chocolate buttercream, top with strawberries. Share with someone to whom you are greatly indebted and with whom you are very close.
> 



End file.
